What output are you expecting? The figure environment is a float, which seems inappropriate in a side bar.
–
Joseph Wright♦Jun 5 '11 at 17:54

I use the bar to distinguish certain sections of text as responses, while the rest of the text unaccompanied by the leftbar are questions. It's an article with a Q&A format, each time an answer is offered the leftbar is inserted.
–
ptrcaoJun 5 '11 at 18:15

It's being used as a fancy quotation environment if you like.
–
ptrcaoJun 5 '11 at 18:16

1 Answer
1

Use leftbar inside the figure environment. By changin the nesting you still can let it float. If you don't need floating, you don't need a figure environment: captions can be done then using the caption package (or capt-of).

Sorry, I should've made it clearer there are other text, figures and tables contained within leftbar as well - I omitted them because this was a minimal example. So that doesn't appear to be an option for me... Any other ideas Stef, or others?
–
ptrcaoJun 5 '11 at 18:05

@ptrcao: I added an example without figure but with caption.
–
Stefan Kottwitz♦Jun 5 '11 at 18:13

It was important to create a minipage environment - which you recognised - because otherwise the caption and graphic don't stay together as a coherent unit, so nicely constructed Stef :)
–
ptrcaoJun 5 '11 at 18:21

or anyone else reading this - Can you please have a look at the unwanted cropping depicted in my OP (applies to Stefan's solution immediately preceding) and suggest, if you know a way to control this issue?
–
ptrcaoJun 6 '11 at 11:20